Opacities
On Writing and the Writing Life
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- ¥1,800
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- ¥1,800
発行者による作品情報
Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
Opacities is a book about writing, publishing, and friendship. Rooted in an epistolary relationship between Sofia Samatar and a friend and fellow writer, this collection of meditations traces Samatar's attempt to rediscover the intimacy of writing
In a series of compressed, dynamic prose pieces, Samatar blends letters from her friend with notes on literature, turning to Édouard Glissant to study the necessary opacity of identity, to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha for a model of literary kinship, and to a variety of others, including Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, and Rainer Maria Rilke, for insights on the experience and practice of writing.
In so doing, Samatar addresses a number of questions about the writing life: Why does publishing feel like the opposite of writing? How can a black woman navigate interviews and writing conferences without being reduced to a symbol? Are writers located in their biographies or in their texts? And above all, how can the next book be written?
Blurring the line between author and character and between correspondence and literary criticism, Opacities delivers a personal, contemplative exploration of writing where it lives, among impassioned conversations and the work of beloved writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Samatar (The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain) presents a meandering collection of vague musings about writing, publishing, and life. The strongest entries critique the "tyranny of identity" in the publishing industry and lament how authors from marginalized backgrounds are unfairly "asked to speak or write as a representation of a category." Unfortunately, the rest of the book lacks this clarity of purpose. Samatar drifts between meditations on the slow pace at which she writes, her struggle to collapse the distance between real life and how it's recreated on the page, and how the act of publication alienates the author from their own work. However, the brief entries end before she has a chance to fully develop any of these ideas. Seeking to call attention to how her literary influences have shaped her work and outlook, Samatar includes extensive quotes from Roland Barthes, Franz Kafka, Mieko Kanai, Clarice Lispector, and other writers, but many are presented with minimal commentary, which can make this feel more like a compendium of quotations than an original work. Samatar succeeds perhaps too well in her "project of deep aimlessness," stringing together gnomic pronouncements about writing that fail to cohere ("So writing will be a body and a dwelling. Box with aperture. Edged and moving"). This falls flat.
